I think [AI] tags would be good. That way a certain subset of members could just drive-by downvote without getting themselves dirty. [NOT AI] seems redudant since we've already defined [AI], but again for quick filtering purposes, I see no harm in both.
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I think the reality is that people will downvote the AI posts, and that will incentivise people to not disclose it or outright lie. The other thing that came to mind here is the fact that I've been trying to set my RSS reader up to not show me anything if AI is mentioned. It turns out that I haven't been able to do that because it couldn't discern "AI" from "fair", "pair", "air" etc. but the sentiment was there because I'm sick of hearing about it, and I imagine a lot of people are. This could cause readers or whatever else is configured to block AI content to block the non-ai content too, just because it's mentioned. Additionally it does bring AI to the forefront, which doesn't help with that AI fatigue.
😂 yes indeed!
Me: I'm sick of hearing about AI. It's very existence brings me down. It's bad for the environment, bad for code, bad for mental illness, bad for humans.
AI: Sorry to interrupt, but have you considered using AI to help with this matter?
Legitimately, I agree it would be a good use, but I will be sticking with non-AI solutions regardless.
"Small," non-generative, BERT-like models, would probably be more appropriate.
Anthropic does sentiment analysis with regex in Claude Code though ¯\(ツ)/¯
Because use of AI is bad for me. YMMV.
I find that whenever I have used AI to find a solution, I have forfeited learning, so I avoid it completely so that I can learn about the thing that AI would have otherwise shortcut for me. Regarding this specific example, while it may or may not be the case that AI is the best tool for sentiment analysis, it's not the best or most efficient tool for keyword filtering, and keyword filtering is all I'd really need. In the event that I cared enough about the filtering to find or build a solution, it wouldn't be with AI for this reason, but also because of the aforementioned reasons. Even if they're not applicable to this very scenario, I'd rather not involve myself in the technology at all if I can help it.
Well, as I said I'm not really going to try to solve it. I prefer to not see headlines that talk about AI, politics and some other things, and I'll filter them out and I'll use the tools that are already available to me to do so. Now if my RSS app came out with a feature that used AI sentiment analysis to filter out those topics, I'd probably switch it on, but I'm not going to involve myself in solving the problem in any regard, but in the hypothetical, "regex soup" would rank higher than AI.
Yeah, well, you're talking to a human with contradictions and biases. I don't want to use it, but I suppose the scenario presented is the lesser of two evils for me personally.
I don't know what a language classifier is. I'm chatting to you about it because you seem interested, but otherwise I prefer to live as though none of this exists. That might make me some kind of luddite.
I've come to the same place with politics. It got to a point recently where, in my opinion, the worst possible act has been committed by the most powerful people with the most concrete evidence that we're ever going to see. In my mind it was the ultimate test to see if we mere mortals had any sort of control over justice and unchecked power. Once it became evident to me that we don't, I have completely checked out, and will now live my life in ignorance to politics, because if I don't have control, and it depresses me, the best thing for me to do is try to carve out a little slice of this world to live in ignorant contentment.
I would love to see an [AI] tag, so I can easily hide it. Coupled with temporary bans in case of missing disclosure it would really sanitize the community
/r/selfhosted has an automod comment that creates a place to disclose how genAI/LLMs were used in the project and the post. I like that.
Either ban vibe coded projects entirely or ban vibe coded projects that have less than a year of history. If allowing "mature" vibe coded projects, require the tag.
Spaces like this become so much worse when "i made this last week look at the shiny ui 🎉🎉🎉🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀🚀" projects that will never ever see any form of maintenance are allowed.
What does it mean for a project to deserve the [AI] tag? This matters, because you may have a lot of projects where a developer may think "no" and someone else thinks "yes". Some examples from my day job:
- Developer used AI to understand part of the codebase and suggest ways to accomplish goal. Developer incorporated that suggestion, though using their own knowledge deviated from AI's suggestion in parts. Developer wrote the code themselves. Is this project [AI] or [NOT AI]?
- Developer used AI to review existing (human-written) code for quality and security purposes. AI noticed some issues and proposed fixes. Developer reviewed and accepted them. Is this project [AI]?
- Developer knew they wanted to implement a feature, and while implementing it there was a boilerplate function. Developer asked AI to write this function, manually reviewed it, confirmed it worked, and added it to the codebase. Is this project [AI]?
In these examples the developer carefully reviews the AI's output, which I think distinguishes it from vibe-coded slop, which at least is what I want to ignore.
It's also worth noting that an open-source project may receive and incorporate a well-written contribution where the human developer used AI carefully like this. Unless they disclosed that they used AI, it may be unknowable to the project maintainers whether their project is [AI] or not, depending on how you define it. What tag should these projects use?
@festus @selfhosted Excellent examples. What the tag [AI] conveys is not what you really need to know, which is the quality of the code (component/unit), unit testing, and so forth. I assume there is some acceptance testing done at the project level. The human who submits the code must understand that flaws in their code is their responsibility, just as those who contribute/maintain the project are responsible at the system level. It is both an objective and reputational process. Does it really matter what tools are used if the work product passes the test, verification and validation criteria? Sloppy code is not unique to AI tools.
I hate it when the default state is turned into the negative. Every time I have to specify "unsweet tea" I feel the sands of my lifeforce slipping away.
No tag for not AI.
Only AI tags needed, which helps remind people that slop should be warned against. We don't need to warn for slop free apps
But wouldn't that be far more useful? Many people seem to be looking for projects who don't ever touch AI. Devs who use a [No AI] tag show that they follow the same agenda and most likely will not change their opinion on the next release.
No, because the absence of the tag indicates it's free of AI
Or that the author didn't know about the rule?
That's why we have mods
Or...we could make it easier for them and make the use of the tag a conscious decision indicating something instead of relying on the mod's voluntary work to correct for an implied meaning.
I, like other respondents, don't care if AI is used, I only care if AI was trusted.
AI is a tool to enhance a workflow, and as long as a skilled human is reviewing it and fixing it, fine.
We would be better off defining a programmer's project vs an ametuer hour vibe coded monstrosity, but that won't ever really happen.
What I am curious about is why this should be a negative for anyone, devs who want to use AI get an easy way to filter out the people who will kick back against it, the people who will kick back against it get a quieter existence, Lemmy should be happy.
I keep seeing how having to categorise will provide a perverse incentive to not disclose and I guess I don't understand why that would be the case.
It's not like they are tricking people into buying these free programs, it's not like they are soliciting contributions from other devs (they have an AI for that), and its not like there is some sort of score being kept (besides earning some sort of credibility on Github as a pro-AI developer through that star thing I guess).
So what would be the motivation to try to trick the community into embracing these sorts of projects? Open and enthusiastic disclosure and a community push to simply move on if you find that style of development distasteful would work better for everyone.
I have walked away from using a project that was developed with AI and I didn't feel the need to slam the developer for it, I just moved on. They didn't betray my trust because they don't owe me anything, and I didn't unfairly judge their work because I don't owe them anything. Everyone's a winner.
But that's just my humble opinion.
I feel it's a little dangerous, because it would give a false sense of security in [no-ai] projects.
We have all seen tons of projects 100% written without any AI that are very poorly coded and full of insecurities.
Yes, please. I don't like seeing a "neat handy application" only to find that 95% of it was coded by Claude, the fact of which is either buried, or not even mentioned until you visit the repo and see that it's the top contributor.
I know nothing about running a Lemmy instance, so I thought I'd ask. Does the Lemmy framework allow something like this:
spoiler
If so, maybe that'd be less annoying to some. The screenshot is from selfh.st.
I absolutely don't want Meta Tags in every titles. It makes reading the list of posts super annoying.
I also don't feel the need to know whether there's some AI commits, but I do want to know if a project is largely vibe coded. I don't have an objective metric on where this line could be drawn.
I think the status quo is kinda fine. Some commenter will point it out and will get enough upvotes to be visible on first glance. It's not perfect but good enough for me.
I find myself commenting three questions on any post about a new application somebody developed.
- What is your experience in [subject matter of app]?
- What is your experience in software development?
- What percentage of the code for this app was written by AI? What percent was written by you?
Personally, I wouldn't mind if all new app posts were required to answer these questions for their post. It doesn't discriminate, it just asks them to lay their cards on the table for everyone to see. The community can judge from there.
Some commenter will point it out and will get enough upvotes to be visible on first glance. It’s not perfect but good enough for me.
I don't necessarily disagree here, however there is always the edge case of a certain overly-vocal group being 100% anti-AI, and that any usage of AI is considered a crime against humanity.
I'm not part of that group per se, but I also want full disclosure. If you used AI to get things going and handled it yourself from there, that's one thing. Constant commits from Claude or whatever is a whole different bucket of shit I refuse to touch.
I don’t disagree. Perhaps tags at the end of post titles rather than the beginning, or tags in the body of the post? I’m not sure what people use to filter these things and how those different options would effect usability.
What's the threshold for a tag?
Just add context as a top level comment or in the body text area. Someone can come in to clarify if the poster is missing it.
Even for a poster sometimes it's not obvious if there is any AI in the project. Example: Lutris, dev said they are adding Claude commits and will be scrubbing mentions of the tool from PRs. Sometimes AI is discussed but rejected.
It's easy to tell when a whole project has been vibecoded, but the grey zone of an existing project that may or may not have had slopcode added, is tougher for posters to discern.
Having the tags? Sure.
Making them mandatory? Only if we have 1.- an actual process to determine whether a tag is incorrectly applied (up to a respectable level of confidence) and 2.- an adequate, *enforceable+ punishment for infringers.
See, the problem with this is there’s no objective standard for validating whether somebody is telling the truth or not. So we can impose conventions that say you must tag something as being generated in a certain way, but that doesn’t mean that people are going to actually be forthcoming with the community.
This is a problem that we’re going to have to deal with not just when we’re talking about our self hosted builds, but almost anything that is mediated through a screen. So, if we can figure it out for here, I’d suggest that we tell everybody shortly thereafter; about it because it‘ll solve a lot of problems, in a lot of different places.
Bonus points if whatever we come up with can actually be self hosted.
I agree with others who said AI tag for AI helped projects, no tags for normal projects.
I think that unless you have some way to enforce accuracy, it's meaningless and AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.
An AI bot operator isn't going to tag their material as [AI], more likely than not they'd attempt to use [NOT AI].
I'd also point out that while lemmy doesn't (yet) support hashtags, any "tagging" would probably benefit from using the existing method using a #tag.
Ultimately, you need to ask yourself, is undeclared AI that goes undetected by the community a problem, or the new "normal"?
I'll note that I'm not a proponent of Assumed Intelligence and think that when the bubble bursts we're going to be in a world of hurt, but with a little luck the billionaires will have lost their shirts in the process.
AFAIK automatic detection tools are no better than chance and to my knowledge, getting worse.
It depends.
There are a variety of indicators, some blatant like .cursorrules or CLAUDE.md and some key phrases that can be searched for. Unless they are actively working to hide references, these turn up in the overwhelming majority of the "not admitting but not denying" camp, or the just complete lack of disclosure.
There are also pretty solid indicators with commit logs that can be seen that are... unlikely to ever be a person.
What is getting harder is around the syntax detection tools and fragment detection tools. Some straight up rips from multiple codebases used to be obvious, but some tools are better at refactoring to make that discovery harder too.
Just to be candid, I am in no way anti-AI, I run and train my own models at home on my own hardware. Its a tool - a hammer is great for nailing a board to a wall, and an absolutely wrong choice for trying to screw together a cabinet, and I consider LLMs in the same camp.
If you're trying to vibe code a full project, its probably going to be a massive problem. If you're using it to parse some swagger and generate some hooks based on a prefix you defined for specific types without wanting to bother with smashing a script for the disparate types that can be easily detected with an llm... well, you're probably using it in a way I'd agree with.
Someone did mention an automod disclosure comment, which I really like the idea of, but would need to look into for use on the fediverse, I'm really not sure how good the automods out there are these days. Last time I checked they were.... not so great.
I feel like this could lead to discrimination and prejudice against ai users. It should have been implemented years ago.
I think this is a major over generalisation that misses the main point of why people don't want AI projects. The real questions are:
- Is this slop?
- Does a human understand all of this code?
- Did a human design this deliberately or is it completely derivative and uninspired?
- Will a human take responsibility for bugs that come up?
- Did a human write the docs?
- Will this be maintained or just a weekend project with no substance?
- Does this actually serve a purpose?
Idk how to address these things really. I could see the AI tag going both ways, but I do think it's painting with too broad a brush.
I'm in the process of launching a new business as a single dev, and I want to be upfront about my use of AI, but I notice as soon as I mention any LLM, most people assume what I've built is "vibe coded" without even looking at the applications themselves.
I spent almost two months just setting up the devops side of things before I even considered publishing. Feedback buttons in the apps automatically open issues on my Forgejo, push mirrors to GitHub and Codeberg, and I do weekly progress reports internally (I stopped posting to Lemmy after people felt spammed and now I just post on the site blog)
I'm just not sure how to make it easy to tell that I'm actually putting my heart and soul into building software that should help people.
If curious: https://circuitforge.tech/
I looked at your site. Realistically I think we're talking about two different things here. There are tools which were programmed with the assistance of AI and then there are AI powered tools. Your stuff is clearly the latter.
I think ai powered tools are a lot harder to sell people on right now. The ai powered area is where I see by far the most shovelware/slop.
To be blunt, when I see a new ai powered tool I assume several things:
- This is low effort slop
- A tech bro vibe coded this 100%
- No one cares about this
- It will either make a ton of money or be abandoned next week
- If it's popular, anthropic will buy/clone it and everyone will use their version instead
I know this isn't true of every ai powered app but it's true of 99% of them right now. I really have no idea how you could convince people yours isnt slop.
One idea might be to stop using the term "AI". It's a buzzword with strong connotations. Some people hear it and think "gold rush", some people think "slop" or "data center".
Personally I would be a lot more likely to take a project seriously if they used the term "LLM" or "machine learning" to describe what powers the product.
Also, I don't see anything that looks like obvious AI art to me but DONT USE AI ART. AI art is already terrible on its own but when I see AI art mixed with AI text telling me about an AI powered app I'm 1000% done giving my attention.
For sure on the art. I'm a graphic artist by education and I'm already working with another full-time artist on the application logos. When I make enough I'm planning to hire a proper web developer for the frontend/web design as that's onc area I do lean pretty heavy on the LLM's for assistance.
Funny you should mention the AI vs LLM labeling as I much prefer to call them LLM's or "models", but I'm trying to keep it accessible for non-technical people. I think I'll go back through and rename though.
Also most of the tools are deterministic, with the LLM's filling in gaps where there needs to be some amount of probabilistic interaction, like figuring out what you could cook given only the ingredients in your pantry, or rewriting a resume 26 million ways to satisfy the ATS filters.
If you don't want to use those features, nothing forcing you. They're useful for tracking and organizing without the LLM at all.
Yeah.. Normies for sure don't use the term "LLM". I don't think it would scare them though. They're used to being confused 💀
When I see "AI" I think "tech bro hype" whereas "LLM" makes me think the developer is more likely to have a realistic view of the technology.
I guess this depends a lot on your target demo. But but even just cutting down on usage of the exact term "AI" would help I think. Basically anything is better.
Yes. Anything made, posted, modified, or output by AI should be tagged as such, always, without exception.
Just ban AI already
I think we should have an AI tag, and "not AI" should be the default (otherwise we add "non-" versions of every tag and post titles are a list of what something isn't instead of what it is).
Imo, a lot of the tools here have a high security requirement. Either because they handle personal/private information and/or are exposed to the public internet. AI use is a red flag to me that the developer hasn't properly considered all the security implications of their product.
I'd prefer a [HUMAN] tag for projects without A.I. But yes, tags would be welcome.
YES.
But also, we can tell. Random front-end/dashboard with an incomprehensible tech stack and feature list ? Always AI.
Y'all sound like : "Now basically the only new principle involved is that instead of power being generated by the relative motion of conductors and fluxes, it is produced by the modial interaction of magneto-reluctance and capacitive diractance."
If you see this seal:

You know the project is golden. It uses a no-ai policy specifically.
https://sciactive.com/human-contribution-policy/
We should be pushing projects to adopt this policy (or similar) to have a very clear indicator when something is not slop.
In addition to this, could we potentially make this a badge as well?
https://brainmade.org/
That one is good, but it doesn’t have strict licensing restrictions like the SciActive one. Basically you have to follow the policy with the SciActive one, or you lose the license to use the seal.
Also, the SciActive one is specifically for software projects and covers the full software project explicitly.
Not that the Brain Made one is bad, it just fits a different use case (art, poetry, etc).
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